Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [251]
Similar atrocities took place all across the border regions. In the wake of the Soviet withdrawal, the NKVD left about 21,000 prisoners behind and freed another 7,000. In a final burst of violence, however, departing NKVD troops and Red Army soldiers murdered nearly 10,000 prisoners in dozens of Polish and Baltic towns and villages—Wilno (Vilnius), Drohobycz, Pinsk.25 They shot them in their cells, in the courtyards of their jails, in nearby forests. As they retreated, NKVD troops also burned down buildings and shot civilians, sometimes murdering the owners of the houses in which their own troops had been quartered.26
Farther from the border, where there was more time to prepare, the Gulag attempted to organize proper prisoner evacuations. Three years later, in his long and pompous summation of the Gulag’s war effort, the Gulag’s wartime boss, Viktor Nasedkin, described these evacuations as “orderly.” The plans had been “worked out by the Gulag in coordination with the relocation of industry,” he declared, although “in connection with the well-known difficulties of transport, a significant proportion of the prisoners were evacuated on foot.”27
In fact, there had been no plans, and the evacuations were conducted in a panicked frenzy, often while German bombs were falling all around. The “well-known difficulties of transport” meant that people suffocated to death in overcrowded train cars, or that falling bombs destroyed them before they reached their destination. One Polish inmate, Janusz Puchiski, arrested and deported on June 19, escaped from a burning train full of prisoners, along with his mother and siblings:
At a certain moment, there was a strong explosion and the train stopped. People began escaping from the wagons . . . I saw that the train stood in a deep ravine. I thought I would never get out of there. Airplanes were screaming over my head, my legs seemed to be made of cotton. Somehow I climbed out, and began running to the woods, about 200–250 meters from the tracks. When I’d made it, I turned around, and saw that behind me, in the open space, there were crowds of people. At that moment, the next group of planes arrived and began shooting into the crowds ...28
Bombs also hit a train carrying the inmates of Kolomyja prison, killing some of the prisoners but allowing nearly 300 to escape. Convoy guards captured 150 of them, but later set them free again. As they themselves explained, they had nothing to feed the prisoners and nowhere to keep them. All of the jails in the area had been evacuated.29
The experience of being on a prisoner train during an air raid was relatively unusual, however—if only because prisoners were rarely allowed on the evacuation trains at all. On the train leaving one camp, the families and the baggage of camp guards and administrators took up so much space that there was no room for any prisoners.30 Elsewhere, industrial equipment took priority over people, both for practical and propaganda reasons. Crushed in the West, the Soviet leadership promised to rebuild itself east of the Urals.31 As a result, that “significant proportion” of prisoners—in fact, the overwhelming majority—who Nasedkin had said were “evacuated on foot,” endured long forced marches, descriptions of which sound hauntingly similar to the marches undertaken by the prisoners of the Nazi concentration camps four years later: “We have no transport,” one guard told an echelon of prisoners, as bombs fell around them. “Those who can walk will walk. Protest or not—all will walk. Those who can’t walk—we will shoot. We will leave no one for the Germans . . . you decide your own fate.”32
Walk they did—although the journeys of many were cut short. The rapid advance of the Germans made the